simFlight.COM Flight Simulation News Source

An interesting video on YouTube showing a DC-10 simulator in the Swedish Vasteras Aviation Museum in Vasteras with a flight from Hong Kong Kai Tak. Very impressive!

In a press release Matrox  from Canada reports about their DisplayPort upgrades for the 2H2Go and 3H2Go range of monitor interfaces. DisplayPort is a new standard to connect PC’s to monitors, also used in Home Theatre systems.  “…… Matrox is pleased to offer its first external multi-display upgrades to DisplayPort adopters seeking maximum display performance across multiple displays,” says Samuel Recine, Director of Business Development, Matrox Graphics. “For example, with the new TripleHead2Go DP Edition, the DisplayPort interface allows users to easily connect three displays to a single notebook to generate a purely digital connection from system to monitors, while enabling resolution support of up to an impressive 1680×1050 per external display…..”. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Visser of Prosim4u in The Netherlands offers a special discount until July 31st for their customers. “… Our Boeing 737 Simulator has been placed inside a new training area with many improvements: airco units, better projection screens, a radar screen for ATC vectoring, a complete instructor station with failure control and many other new featuers have been added. Check out our (Dutch) website here….”.

Two news worthy messages that we picked up from our Cockpit Builders Forum. One is a link to a wonderful Blackhawk home cockpit under construction somewhere in The Netherlands (unfortunately the ‘About Us’ part of the site is not  used). Have a look at MH-60S’s website here. The other is the mentioing of a Belgian company, EOS,  offering a ready-made cockpit setup with some possible additional instrument clusters to go with it, if desired. EOS Cockpits can be found here.

While many of you will be busy updating your IPhone  or even  playing with the new 3Gs tonight, let me give you this round-up of  the last two days at simMarket, which were busy ones; besides the add-ons we already singled out in the news there  more releases worth mentioning such as:

NEWPORT – PHOTO REAL MINNEAPOLIS ST. PAUL X FSX
Photo real Minneapolis-St Paul is a ground texture replacement package that adds a whole new level of realism to FSX by displaying photo real satellite images of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. This package covers the entire city and a large suburban area of both Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Whether you enjoy low altitude VFR flights, or high altitude IFR flights, this scenery is sure to add a whole new dimension to FSX.

eDIMENSIONAL – AUDIO FX2 HARDWARE
Superb Gaming and Audio Performance. The all-new AudioFX2 builds upon our previous generations of critically acclaimed AudioFX headsets. You will be thrilled with numerous new features and design elements without sacrificing any of the quality and performance you have come to expect from the AudioFX headsets. Featuring our renowned force feedback feature that is like a home theater in a headset, you’ll gain realistic bass audio sensations and increased situational awareness for improved gaming performance

EAGLE SIMULATIONS – CANCUN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FSX
Welcome to Cancun, Mexico, welcome to sand, sun, beutiful ruins, hundreds of people on the beach, hotels, bridges, and a whole bunch of things that would be better if they weren’t just on the screen. But we’ll take what we can get in this new high detailed and completely helicopter accessible scenery.

EAGLE SIMULATIONS – ALTURAS LAKE (U64) FSX
Alturas lake is like an entirely new airport for FSX. It brings the lake and the airport back to life. By using satellite imagery both the airfield and the lake itself are to real life size specifications. Even boats have been placed with satellite images to ensure ultimate realism.

That’s it for now from the FS supplier you can trust, since 1997: www.simmarket.com.

Simcraft is a Marietta, GA based company specialised in motion simulators for racing games. ‘Like many others’ i hear you think… but this is where Simcraft breaks the rule with their unique approach and they describe it like this: “.. an idea …  for a balanced mass architecture to reduce the need for expensive high force actuation. This one idea created the concept for a new, more effective, more organic, and more affordable way to simulate vehicle dynamics…. SimCraft’s core motion technology is now the most affordable option for anyone seeking a military grade, full motion experience for flight and racing simulation. Analogous to buying the motor and building your own car, STAR is the SimCraft engine that drives the most realistic ZERO latency motion simulations. ”

You can get an idea in the video below; the interesting part for flight simmers is that Simcraft has now deployed a 2DOF (Two Degrees of Freedom) Flight Sim Development Kit that you can get to build in your living room (yes, tell the wife and blame it on me…). And simMarket is in place to deal with your payment technicalities from this side of the ocean on this page.

Flight Illusion is proud to announce the release of the GSA-DME. This octagonal display is based on the Bendix and Collins versions of a DME distance indicator. You can find this gauge typically in King air or other business jets. The selector can be set on NAV1 or NAV 2 and shows respectively the distance (in nautical miles) to the chosen NAV station, the speed (in knots) and the estimated time to arrival (in minutes)

The display can be mounted through a panel and connects through the GSA-55 interface with the computer. The GSA-DME works with FS2004, FSX and X-plane. A brochure can be downloaded from the Flight Illusion website.

simMarket is selling the DME display along with Flight Illusion’s other product lines.

The warm weather is coming, or at least that’s what forecasters are promising, so this is a good time to start thinking about cooling our flightsim PC’s. Guru3D “…… tested the new CoolerMaster Hyper TX3 CPU cooler. Though the cooler will not be high-end performance wise, it can still manage the latest Core 2 Duo and Quad processors really well, and sure, overclocked as well. This new TX3 also supports the upcoming Core i5 processors from Intel based on Socket LGA 1156.

Typically this would not be a massively interesting release of course, however… with a sales price of only 14.95 EUR/USD let’s face it… the dynamic certainly changes for the better. Read the full review here…..”

What with all the Quad Core processors, SLI installations of dual grahics cards, 1 Tb hard disks and the likes, our PC’s need more and more power to run – and be cool(ed). So Guru3D did a review of one of the larger PSU’s (Power Supply Units for those of us abbreviation-challenged). This one has 740 W, there are even bigger ones nowadays. Hilber Hagedoorn writes “…. I reviewed the In Win Commander series power supply. Commander, as in military….”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hilbert Hagedoorn says “…… Being a budget card with a lot of punch, overall performance of the Radeon HD 4770 is to be found in the mid-range segment. We here at Guru3D.com would like to teach you how to get even more out of your 99 USD investment. In fact we’ll show you how to get another 10 to 20% additional performance out of the card, totally free. It only takes a couple of minutes, and when done right we’ll get the 4770 a good chunk faster.

Not only will we learn you how to overclock, we’ll also take a hand full of games and show you the performance benefit. You can find this article here…”.

Guru3D has looked at yet another graphics card. Hilbert Hagedoorn writes “….. Here we have another bang for buck product, a product that I like very much. As what ATI is doing today is pretty remarkable. They are releasing the Radeon HD 4770, a mainstream product at a budget price…..”. Read the rest of this entry »

FS(X) runs mostly on processor power and thus new processors are always interesting for the flight simulator crowd. Guru3D has a look at AMD’s Phenom CPU’s. “……AMD released two processors in the Phenom II line-up, the Phenom II 955BE and the Phenom II X4 945 processor. Both processors can be considered and positioned in AMDs high-end segment, yet will be priced friendly. Yields are good, clock frequencies go up, performance goes up. ….”. Read the rest of this entry »

Guru3D’s Hilbert hagedoorn reports “…… a couple of weeks ago NVIDIA made some small modification to it’s mid-range line-up, in specific their GeForce 9800 GTX+ product. These design changes are related to PCB board design, power efficiency and bringing the overall cost of the product down. As a result the GeForce 9800 GTX+ had what you can call an extreme makeover….”. Read the rest of this entry »

Guru3D writes “… A week or two ago NVIDIA announced it’s latest graphics card positioned in the high-end region, called the GeForce GTX 275. The GeForce GTX 275 is a bit of a hybrid card in-between the GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 285. NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 275 in an allergic reaction to team red’s product to show and flex their rendering muscle….”. Read the rest of this entry »